Is this thing on?

  • 400 Posts
  • 242 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2024

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  • The Democrats should never have to take positions or do things to make voters like them

    Not when the only viable alternative is literal fascisim. At that point all the opposition party against fascism should have to do is not goose-step on camera, but apparently a whole lot of 'murican voters don’t understand direct consequences of inaction.

    By not voting no matter who you said “I am okay with what is happening now”, and you were WARNED this would happen before you chose not to vote (or voted for the self-admitted spoiler) so all this bluster to shield yourself from reality isn’t fooling anyone that understands a room gets dirty if you don’t clean it.

    Look at Canada. Almost 70% voter turnout and the results prevented not only a Trump boot-licker from getting into power but kicked him out of his own fucking riding. Did people vote less progressively than they’d have liked? Absolutely. FPTP is a flawed system, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is Canada won’t be Zeig-heiling for the next four years and we can still work towards fixing the system instead of worrying about brute-squads arresting innocent citizens and deporting them without due process for opposing the Government. That is the power of forethought and action instead of excuses and apathy.








  • Why are other researchers skeptical?

    For starters, there are questions about whether K2-18 b even has water — or a surface that could support life. Modelling studies of it and similar planets suggest that they are probably barren4,5. “A lifeless mini-Neptune scenario remains the most parsimonious explanation,” says Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

    Then there’s the issue of whether DMS or DMDS is actually present, or whether the signal is spurious. The measurement reported by the Cambridge team is “really pushing the limit of what JWST can do”, says Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

    Schmidt and his colleagues recently re-analysed the 2023 claim from the Cambridge team and found no evidence of biosignature molecules in the data6. Schmidt says that the new observations are “pretty noisy, and any reported features could still just be statistical fluctuations”. The Cambridge researchers, however, say that there is just a 0.3% probability that the signal is due to chance.